Novelist Gayle Brandeis was a “Sick Girl”: throughout childhood andadolescence she was beset with recurring symptoms, including stomach cramps and vomiting, that were sometimes so debilitating she had to be hospitalized. Her crusading mother would later in life embark on a documentary film project to bring public awareness to the two “orphan diseases” that she believed caused her siblings’ premature deaths and the illness of many other family members, including her two daughters.

But as Brandeis describes, she and her sister experienced pressure to perform ill health, exaggerating symptoms as a means of sustaining a bond with their “operatic” and attention-seeking mother, who thrived on her adversarial relationship with doctors. As the sisters grew older, their mother’s own symptoms of mental illness became more pronounced, although she was never appropriately diagnosed or treated. Her growing paranoia focused on a range of objects, from her husband to the strangers that she believed were spying on her and conspiring against her. Brandeis struggled to maintain a relationship, alternating between appeasing her mother and attempting to confront her with her confabulations and encourage her to seek help.

The film project became a particular source of tension. Her mother accused both of her daughters of not supporting her even while they gamely participated in on-camera interviews. Brandeis’ memoir takes both her title and many excerpts of dialogue from the film project, which was nearly completed before the author’s mother committed suicide, hanging herself in the parking lot below a seniors’ home shortly after the birth of Brandeis’ third child. For days she had been missing, her family vainly searching for her and periodically hearing from strangers reporting peculiar encounters with her.

In the wake of her mother’s death, which Brandeis interprets as an attempt to prevent involuntarily hospitalization, she experiences marital upheaval while she tries to stabilize her life, including her teaching and writing careers. Only several years later, the pieces of her identity more intact, is she able to visit the site of her mother’s death. Brandeis’ reflection on death by hanging is difficult to read, although clearly a necessary part of the work of mourning that the author needed to do. I was reminded of a student I taught several years ago who found it difficult to remain present in class when there were jokes about death or suicide; she had found her brother’s body when she was in high school, and the images remained vivid and immediate for her in moments of stress. Our culture has a surprising number of jokes and references—like the game “Hangman,” as Brandeis points out—which require survivors of suicide to deal with ongoing painful triggers that are expressed casually.

Reviewing the memoir in The New York Times, Meghan Daum complains that the memoir’s “shifts between first-person narration, film transcripts and letters addressed to her mother cause the book to buckle somewhat under the weight of its own confusions.” “Brandeis may have finally disrupted her mother’s story line,” Daum concludes, “but that’s a separate matter from finding her own.” I had a different impression: Brandeis conveys her life as messy and complicated, with jumps back and forth in time, but part of what she is getting at is the danger of creating a simplified story line about one’s life, a heroic narrative in her mother’s case, that admits little in the way of ambiguity, that cannot tolerate multiple perspectives or contradictory evidence. Brandeis writes, posthumously, to her mother, noting her brother-in-law’s observation that it was “a story that had killed you, a story your brain had made up. Writing our story now is saving me. I’m writing my way toward a more honest, more vocal life . . . I’m writing my way into feeling proud to be your daughter.” This is a sensitive and lyrical—and messy and funny and difficult—memoir about accommodating a family member’s severe mental illness.